I know that I’m reading a collaboration, a book that would be very different without the interventions of a brilliant editor. When I read the finished book, I can’t remember most of the passages we cut I don’t doubt anymore that the book is stronger without them. I remember feeling, in the most difficult moments, that I was losing authorship over my work, that I was compromising some distinctive element that made the book mine. Only then, when I had done the work-I always resist work, I’m the laziest person I know-could I see the virtues and flaws of what I had made.

Working on revisions to my novel, I found that I couldn’t judge the validity of my editor’s criticisms until I had worked through a new version of a passage. I’m not particularly given to confidence in my judgment I can justify anything, I sometimes think. I’m suspicious of the arguments we make to justify our opinions about art, especially art we’ve made. The book, sections of which I had finished years before, became alive for me again.Ī favorite teacher of mine in music school, a composer, used to talk about the importance of the right wrong note, the eccentricity that both surprises and feels immediately inevitable.

But slowly, revision came to feel more and more like composition, and the manuscript came to resemble the notebooks in which I wrote the first draft of the novel. As I worked through each page I laid it face down, using the overleaf for rewrites, adding scraps and post-its as necessary. I wasn’t sure I could make it better, and as we inched our way forward I felt I was losing my ability to make my own judgments, or my ability to see the manuscript at all.

Painfully often, in the margins I found the notation “not good enough,” or “this needs to be better.” Mitzi seldom suggested particular language to fix problems, but she was eagle-eyed in spotting them. Sometimes entire passages were struck, sometimes whole pages often there would be a note telling me to condense several paragraphs to one. All of the changes were at line level, none affected plot or structure, but they added up to a major edit: we cut 17,000 words from an 83,000-word manuscript. I worked by hand on a clean copy of the manuscript, with Mitzi’s marked copy on my iPad.

What belongs to you garth